Page 54 of Bratva Sacrifice

Alexei is a connoisseur of art. And stolen paintings.

I hesitate to speculate at the value, but I know for certain that the fifty thousand dollars in books he claims I ruined? That’s not even a dent on how much these pieces are worth. There’s millions of dollars of art on the walls of this gallery, millions more in busts and statuary and artifacts of ancient civilizations. I’ve seen museums with less impressive collections.

It’s a collection that seems to breathe, changing in bits and pieces at a time. Sometimes a piece leaves the walls; sometimes I visit to find new works stacked carefully in a corner, awaiting a place on the walls. Like I imagine a museum might rotate exhibits, except there seems to be no particular rhyme or reason for these changes.

I spend at least a few minutes every day in the gallery. Some pieces are constants—paintings hung so high upon the walls that they’d require a ladder to remove safely. Some busts and statues and antique jewelry pieces have pedestals of their own and sit protected beneath glass. But I like hunting for the changes, trying to determine what has most recently arrived and whether it will stay.

He catches me one day with my nose pressed against the glass set upon a newly-added pedestal surrounding what I’m certain has to be an Imperial Fabergé egg.

“You like that one?” he asks.

“It’s beautiful.” But its jeweled surface is so delicate and ornate. Not the sort of art I would ever associate with Alexei. “Why do you have it?”

“What, I am not allowed to like art?” he asks on a huff of faux-offense. He lifts his chin to indicate the egg resting behind glass. “This one,” he says, “officially it is missing from records. It was made for Empress Maria Feodorovna in 1899. It survived the Russian Revolution, and fell into the hands of a private collector in the 1950s. Now it is mine.” He grins, one of those wolf-grins with too many teeth. “You want to use it?”

“Use it?” I choke.

“The inside is meant to hold small things, women’s things. Like bottle of perfume, maybe.”

For a half a second, I imagine this priceless, beautiful, bejeweled work of art clunking around in my purse, its incomparable form reduced only to the function of holding a perfume bottle. “Bite your tongue,” I tell him.

“Come, Katya. Many women would like this; to own a jewel made for an empress.”

“It belongs in a museum. How much of this stuff is stolen?”

“I did not steal, koshechka, if this is what you ask.”

Maybe not, but he bought at least one of these paintings from someone who did. “You’re almost never in here,” I say. “Why do you have so much art, if not to enjoy it?”

He shrugs. “I do enjoy, from time to time,” he says. “There are things I keep because I like. But for most of these things, is because art is easiest to move.”

Move? “I don’t understand.”

Alexei chuckles. “Say there is someone who owes me lots of money,” he says. “Fifteen million dollars for”—he catches himself—“certain things.”

Certain things. Certain illegal things.

“Now I have problem,” he continues. “Fifteen million dollars in cash for unspecified things will make government entities suspicious. Even a check for such an amount is suspect. The government will want to know what this is for, why I have been paid so much with no records.”

I guess they can’t exactly write guns or drugs in the memo line.

“So instead,” he says as he gestures to a painting hung low on the wall to his right. For easy removal? “I sell this person who owes me money a painting. This one is inexpensive; only one hundred thousand when I buy. The man who owes me money, he buys this painting from me for the fifteen million he owes to me.”

“What? But that’s so much more!”

“It is what he owes me,” he says. “And art is unique in this way. It is worth whatever someone will pay. How can the government say this painting is not worth fifteen million? It is worth so much if that is what is paid for it. So in this way, I get my money. I pay taxes on my profit. And if the government asks, I tell them—the money is for sale of this painting.”

Hiding sales of illicit goods within fine art transactions. He gets a receipt of sale, and his dirty money is suddenly clean in the eyes of the government. “That’s diabolical,” I tell him.

“This is business,” he says. “Tax evasion is among easiest of crimes to prove. This is how many criminals are apprehended. Not because they are caught smuggling or running drugs. But because they do not pay the government what is owed. Me? I have receipts.” He shrugs. “Is victimless crime, Katya.”

Probably I should be more troubled by the thought of mafia money laundering than I am. But even if this particular crime is more or less victimless, how much of the rest of it is? A shiver slips down my spine as I think about that door with its pin pad that remains locked. I haven’t seen Piotr for—a long time, now, I think. I didn’t see him often before Alexei had him taken to the place he called the pit, but I think I’ve been sort of…looking for him. Noticing his absence.

Wondering what, exactly, it means. Knowing that even if I asked, even if Alexei deigned to answer, it might well be one more thing I wish I could forget.

∞∞∞

“I don’t think Anatoli likes me very much,” I say as I cuddle up against Alexei’s bare chest on the massive couch in one of the lounge rooms on the lower level of the house. Alexei found me halfway through a documentary on the wives of Henry VIII, and even if it’s not something he’s terribly interested in himself, he doesn’t demand I change the channel.